The How To page is for people who want to get their hands dirty, or are thinking about getting them all greased up. Just watch, learn and ask. Before you know it, you are building your own beauty’s. These posts will be a combination of collected information from the web and produced by our own.
In this post we try to help you on how to build your own Brat Seat.
This post will included many visual support, while this will help you the most. The sources used for this post can be found at the end. We hope this will help to solve wiring on a Cafe Racer (and other bikes).
Today the wrench monkeys at Kickwrench will show you a super easy, super fast and super cheap way on how to buld you own brat style seat.
Today’s DIY wednesday is all about seats. We’ll walk you through building a fiberglass base and carving up the foam. We decided to go with kind of a brat seat because there are plenty of tutorials out there on how to make a traditional cafe seat. You could slim the foam down even more if you want some crazy bratitude.
Supplies
- Fiberglass cloth
- Fiberglass resin
- Aluminum tape
- Masking tape
- Cardboard scraps
- Seat foam (Is it off an old crappy seat? Even better.)
- Bread Knife
- Sandpaper
Process
First you build a base using the cardboard and masking tape. For a good fit, use the cardboard only to fill in large gaps between the frame rails. Use the bike’s frame as your seat’s frame as much as possible. Cover it all with masking tape. Also, put some tape or rags around your frame below the seat pan to keep resin drips off.
Step 1 Cardboard and masking tape base
Now that you have a good base for your seat pan, cover the cardboard and masking tape with the aluminum tape. The aluminum tape will keep the resin from sticking to your cardboard/tape base. Optionally, once the aluminum tape is down, you can put a thin coating of car wax to get the finished fiberglass pan to release more easily from your cardboard base.
Step 2 Aluminum tape
Time for the messy part. Following the instructions on your fiberglass, lay 4-6 layers of fiberglass cloth onto the aluminum tape. Once the fiberglass is completely cured, use a dremel or a similar tool to trim the edges.
Step 3 Fiberglass
For our seat, we used the original seat foam from our bike. Some of it was trashed so we didn’t feel too bad about chopping it up. Using a bread knife, make the big cuts. We took about half of the height off. Use coarse sandpaper to get your final shape.
Step 4 Use a bread knife for the big cuts
You can use a sharpie to draw out your cuts before you make them.
Once you have the final shape of your foam you have a few choices for covering. You can use a friend, find a shop, call your mom or do it yourself! We chose a black vinyl with horizontal sticthing every 2 inches or so. A shop will charge around $100-$150 so we suggest covering it yourself if you have the skills.
Stitching
And there you have it! That’s how you build a brat-style seat for your bike. Here’s another finished product shot.
Building a Cafe Racer Yourself?
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